Coronary Heart Disease Risk Factors (CHDRFs) are major causes of death in the industrialized world. CHD risk factors include Type 2 Diabetes (and its precursor, Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT)), hyperlipidemia or dyslipidemia, overweight, obesity and essential hypertension, i.e., a form of hypertension that occurs without a discoverable organic cause. The CHDRF syndrome may, therefore, be defined as a group of interrelated disorders: Type 2 Diabetes, IGT, Dyslipidemia, Overweight, Obesity and essential hypertension. It has also become apparent that Type 2 Diabetes, by itself, represents a syndrome of various, in part sequential, disease states which interact with other components of the CHDRF syndrome. However, the exact interrelationships between the disease states that make up these syndromes is not fully understood. A wide variety of chemical and physical abnormalities associated with these syndromes exist. They include elevations in fasting blood glucose and gluconeogenesis in spite of significant increases in fasting insulin and C-peptide concentrations and increases in lipogenesis. Typically associated with lipogenesis are increases in levels of fasting Free Fatty Acid (FFA), fasting triglycerides (TG) and total cholesterol concentrations, increases in levels of fasting Low Density Lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol, decreases in levels of fasting High Density Lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol, an increased LDL/HDL ratio, increases in body weight and increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
Although these syndromes are interrelated and typically result from derangements in nutrient metabolism, all the associated symptoms may not be present in individual patients. Accordingly, in some patients lipid metabolism problems may predominate, while in others, carbohydrate metabolism problems may be predominant. While these factors, which lend one aspect of the syndrome to dominate over another, are not well understood, it is clear that each portion of the syndrome, or combinations of portions of the syndrome, represents risk factors in coronary heart disease.